Issue No. 101

Table of Contents

2018  |  No. 101

Puff Pastry  James MacGuire
Light, Delicate, and Largely Forgotten

Le Pâté en Croûte  Guélia Pevzner
To Make a Dry Pâté Would Be a Charcutier’s Greatest Fault

Man’oushé  Barbara Abdeni Massaad
The Lebanese Love Their Bread

Traditional Ovens in India  Archana Pidathala
Simple, Timeless

Caramel Tart  Edward Behr
Two Perfect Complements, Caramel and Butter

Poem
“Emily Dickinson Orders Out”  Henry Rathvon

Cheese Anthology
Four British Territorials: Red Leicester, Lancashire, Stilton, and Wensleydale  Edward Behr

Why This Bottle, Really?
2013 Gutturnio Frizzante, Croci, Emilia  Alice Feiring
2014 Les Crayéres, Coteaux Champenois, Blanc de Noirs, Aurélien Lurquin, Champagne  Vanya Filipovic

Resources
A Better Beer Glass: Is There One?  Edward Behr

Restaurants
Lil Deb’s Oasis in Hudson, New York  Tamar Adler
The Auberge of the Fabric Flowers
Casa Gangotena in Quito, Ecuador  Max Nathanson
An Early Leap Toward Refined Ecuadorian Dining

Six Addresses
Asheville, North Carolina: Mountain Cuisine Meets the World   Ronni Lundy

Books
Robyn Eckhardt’s Istanbul & Beyond  Nancy Harmon Jenkins
Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat  Edward Behr
Yemisí Aríbisálà’s Longthroat Memoirs  Edward Behr

An oven — a way to make economical use of fuel — is a big step beyond a primordial open fire, and it leads to tastes that aren’t achieved in other ways. In this issue, we consider a few foods baked in an oven — flatbread in a Lebanese tannur, kebabs in an Indian tandoor, classic French pâtés and puff pastry in Western-style ovens. The oldest kind of oven, still very much in use, is a tannur, an Arabic word that descends from the ancient Akkadian word tanūru, which might be 4,000 to 5,000 years old and combines older words for “fire” and “mud.” In English, a tannur is sometimes called a vertical oven. It’s cylindrical, open at the top, and traditionally built of clay by women; it may be dug into the earth. Especially, it’s used to bake flatbreads, including pita-type inflated loaves. You reach in from the top and stick the dough to the sides, where it cooks very fast. Heavy Western-style loaves, in contrast, must be set on the hearth of a horizontal oven, whose more recent origins are suggested by its Arabic name, furn, which comes from the Latin furnus for “oven.”

Puff pastry is merely 400 years old. It combines flour and butter in a way that magically creates delicate leaves. My plain-spoken son, who doesn’t like pie, on tasting a slice of James MacGuire’s puff-pastry apple tart said it was the best pie he had ever tasted. He loved the flavors of butter and

caramel-like browning, and the absence of the raw-flour taste of so many pies. Watching James work, at first you might not see how controlled and precise his motions are, but look closely and you see they lead to exact textures and thicknesses: every move not only counts but shows the familiarity of having been done countless times.

Much more simply and quickly made is flaky tart or pie dough, the subject of an article and recipe I wrote for AoE 98. After they were published, two realizations came to me. First, in writing and baking I had been distracted by all the advice I had always heard about keeping things cold and not overworking the dough. I hadn’t focused on the one key that leads to tenderness: the way you work the butter into the flour. Second, in reaction to all the underbaked pastry in the world, I had been too concerned with browning, and I hadn’t quite understood that it’s important to bake only to a deep golden or the butter flavor is starts to be lost. (I’ve revised the article and the recipe.)

Also in this issue, in the Cheese Anthology, I delve further into British cheese.

EdBehr-Signature

 

 

Contributors

Edward Behr (“Caramel Tart”; “Four British Territorials: Red Leicester, Lancashire, Stilton, and Wensleydale“; “Resources: A Better Beer Glass”Books: Salt Fat Acid Heat and Longthroat Memoirs) is the author of The Food & Wine of France and the publisher of The Art of Eating.

Tamar Adler (Restaurants: Lil Deb’s Oasis) is the author of An Everlasting Meal and a contributor to Vogue. Her second book, Something Old, Something New, will be published by Scribner in April.

Alice Feiring (“Why This Bottle, Really?”) is the author of four books about wine, starting with The Battle for Wine and Love: Or How I Saved the World from Parkerization; the latest, The Dirty Wine Guide, is about soil and taste. She is the publisher of The Feiring Line newsletter, centered on reviews of natural wine.

Vanya Filipovic (“Why This Bottle, Really?”) is wine director and co-owner of Vin Papillon and Joe Beef in Montreal and is an importer of organic and biodynamic wines through her agency Dame-Jeanne. She is currently working on opening a new wine bar called Vin Mon Lapin in Montreal’s Little Italy.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins (Books: Istanbul & Beyond) is the author of more than half a dozen books about food, including The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook and, with her daughter, Sara Jenkins, The Four Seasons of Pasta. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times and many other publications.

Ronni Lundy (Six Addresses: Asheville, North Carolina), born in Kentucky and currently living in North Carolina, is the author of Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken and Victuals, both about the food of the Appalachian South.

 

James MacGuire (“Puff Pastry”) is a chef and baker, an expert in classical French cooking, and a leading authority on bread. He lives in Montreal.

Barbara Abdeni Massaad  (“Manoushé”) was born in Beirut, grew up in Florida, and returned to Lebanon. She wrote and took the photographs for both Man’oushé: Inside the Street Corner Lebanese Bakery and Mouneh: Preserving Foods for the Lebanese Pantry; she is also the author of Mezze: A Labor of Love and Soup for Syria, whose profits help to provide food relief for Syrian refugees.

Max Nathanson (Restaurants: Casa Gangotena in Quito, Ecuador) is a graduate student in international development at the University of Oxford and a freelance photojournalist.

Guélia Pevzner (“Le Pâté en Croûte”) was born in Moscow and lives in France, where she is a member of the Confrérie des Fins Gourmets Eurélien et du Véritable Pâté de Chartres. She writes for Fine Art, Paris Match, and Elle, as well as publishing columns in Russia and broadcasting on the BBC and RFI. Her most recent book, in Russian, is a history of medieval cuisine for children.

Archana Pidathala (“Traditional Ovens in India”) is the author of the cookbook Five Morsels of Love, based on a manuscript left unfinished by her grandmother, about the traditional Andhra cuisine of southeast India. She lives in Bangalore.

Henry Rathvon (“Emily Dickinson Orders Out”) creates crossword puzzles for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal with his partner Emily CoxHe is working on a collection of poems about food.

 


Top photograph: Manoushé by Barbara Abdeni Massaad.

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